To Jude Renaud, "just say know" is a more sensible slogan for drug education than "just say no."
The former Elphinstone Secondary School teacher is opposed to abstinence-based drug education programs such as the Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) program taught in schools by police officers. And she doesn't want students to be expelled from school for using drugs.
Instead, she would like to see "science-based and reality-based" drug education taught as part of the curriculum from Grade 3. Students who show up drunk or stoned to class should get in-school counselling, not be sent out on the street where they are "fair game for any criminal activity," she proposes.
"Law enforcement officers do not belong in the classroom. Teachers need to take full responsibility for teaching drug education," says Renaud. "Suspensions and expulsions are not the approach to teach about drugs."
Renaud spent eight years teaching at Elphi. As part of her masters' degree in education, which she earned in 1998, she did research on how technology affects indigenous cultures in Canada, the U.S. and Mexico. She travelled to China to research computer studies and visual literacy, then worked as principal of a First Nations school in northern B.C. from 2000 to 2003.
Now, Renaud has taken on an activist role to promote changes in school drug policies and drug education. "I couldn't work from within the system. I had to come out of it," she says.
Renaud is the Canadian chair of Educators for Sensible Drug Policy (EFSDN), a U.S.-based teachers' organization opposed to the "war on drugs" approach. Last year she presented EFSDN's ideas to the B.C. Federation of Teachers' annual general meeting. Next month she will be a keynote speaker at a conference on drug policy at School District 8 in the Kootenays.
Her husband, Paul Renaud, is a communications/media director for EFSDN. The couple is passionate in promoting their view that prohibition, far from solving drug problems, makes matters worse.
"Students say marijuana is easier to get than alcohol. We should legalize, regulate and tax marijuana like we do alcohol," says Paul Renaud, a former Marijuana Party candidate.
According to Jude Renaud, teachers do not get sufficient training in how to handle drug problems and provide drug education.
"We had nothing. Teachers were left on their own in classrooms with students who could have come to school stoned," she says.
The usual answer was to suspend the problem students, but Renaud doesn't see that as a solution.
"Kids who take drugs are marginalized. They're not dealt with, and they need to be," she says. "It's my duty as an educator to give children what will make them well and healthy."
Renaud definitely doesn't think drug use in school is OK. "Children should not be on drugs, period, or smoking or using caffeine or alcohol," she says. "Legal drugs [including the often-prescribed Ritalin] are causing just as much or more harm."
But she thinks preaching abstinence has proven to be counter-productive, and says the reality is that many students are not abstaining from drugs. "My concern is the kids who don't abstain. What do we have to offer them?" she asks.
Renaud believes teachers need to give honest information about drugs to students, but "as long as we have an illegal substance, teachers will not talk about it."
Through EFSDN, she hopes to offer teachers and school districts an alternative to DARE for drug education. She says DARE promotes misinformation and focuses too much on illegal drugs, ignoring the problems posed by legal substances such as alcohol. One alternative she likes is a program called Safety First, developed by California drug researcher Marsha Rosenbaum, which distinguishes between drug use and drug abuse and emphasizes harm reduction.
"Teachers really do want to address [drug education]," she says. "At the BCTF meeting, teachers were saying, 'It's about time. I've been teaching 30 years and we still can't talk about this'."
